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Dead Biker
Inside the Violent World of the Mexican Drug Cartels
Jerry Langton
Contents
Also by Jerry Langton
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Copyright
Also by Jerry Langton
Biker: Inside the Notorious World of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang
Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian Hells Angels
Fighter: The Unauthorized Biography of Georges St-Pierre, UFC Champion
Gangland: The Rise of the Mexican Drug Cartels from El Paso to Vancouver
Outlaw Biker: The Russian Connection
Rage: The True Story of a Sibling Murder
Showdown: How the Outlaws, Hells Angels and Cops Fought for Control of the Streets
Acknowledgments
After three books, several years, a number of countries, dozens of adventures, and countless close scrapes, Ned “Crash” Aiken has finally finished his long journey. Of course, he could not have made it had he not been assisted by an incredible team.
The obvious person to thank is Don Loney, everyone's favorite editor and bluesman. Without Don, I couldn't put two words together with any level of confidence. After him, the guy to thank would be Brian Will, who keeps everything running.
It would be inconceivable not to thank Robert Harris, who somehow took a proposal to record a biker cop's memoirs and made it into a fictional account of what it's like to be a biker. And, of course, I have to thank my agent and best pal, BG Dilworth, who (in his distinctive Southern drawl) told me: “Y'all ought to make this a series—y'know, write a sequel or two.”
Others who deserve thanks after working on the book include slick marketers Erin Kelly and the formidable Robin Dutta-Roy, managing editor Alison Maclean (who said the nicest thing I have ever heard about my writing), production editor Jeremy Hanson-Finger, and cover designer Adrian So for his usual awesome job.
Of course, Ned's adventures would not have been possible if it were not for the brave efforts of the journalists, police officers, lawyers, and others I have spoken with. They allowed me to get a much better understanding of how organized crime works in Mexico and Eastern Europe and how it affects us in North America.
I also must thank Leta Potter because it would be dangerous not to.
Finally, I have to thank my family—Tonia, Damian and Hewitt—for all their patience and suggestions.
Chapter One
Ned's heart sank when he saw the cops at the corner. The police had set up a random checkpoint just a few feet from where he was stuck in traffic, and he hadn't seen it until it was too late. As they had all over Mexico, including his dusty and slow-moving new hometown of Nogales, just south of the Arizona border, police regularly stopped cars, checked IDs, and searched for contraband. Ned was trapped. Traffic behind him wouldn't let him back up, and he couldn't make a U-turn on the narrow street. Facing up to the police was inevitable. And cops in Mexico are not like cops in the United States.
The roadblocks were officially part of a massive government crackdown on drug trafficking, but everyone in Nogales—maybe all of Mexico—knew that most of the time the cops were just looking for opportunities to shake you down for cash or iPods or cell phones or anything else they might want to keep or sell.
At least these guys were Federales, the national cops, Ned thought to himself. The state police were a lot worse. Unkempt and uneducated, those guys very rarely made any pretense about not being crooks, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, and demanding bribes at the same time. Ned had heard the Sonora state cops were paid about $95 a week, and since expenses were about the same as they were across the border, he wasn't at all surprised they weren't exactly professional—and had their hands out at every opportunity. At least the Federales made an attempt to look like they were something more than just a gang. They almost always took bribes, but at least they usually didn't threaten you or rummage through your car for valuables.
Ned slowed and watched as the cops searched the car in front of him. He saw a few hundred pesos change hands and the pissed-off driver speed away. As the cops waved him over, Ned noticed a couple of things out of the ordinary. One of them had a goatee, which he knew was against Federale policy, and two of them were carrying AK-47 assault rifles, which he knew the Federales did not issue.
Ned had heard that members of the big drug cartels would sometimes wear police uniforms to make it easier to get away with major crimes like kidnapping and murder. He had also heard that it was them, and not the government, who really ran things in Mexico, but that they rarely bothered anyone who was not involved in the drug trade. And for the first time in his adult life, Ned was not.
He had started in high school. Fed up with authority and looking at a bleak future, Ned decided to take the easy way out. He started selling drugs, eventually becoming a full-patch member of the Sons of Satan motorcycle gang. After a huge police raid brought many of them down, Ned saved himself from a long prison sentence by ratting on his former “brothers.”
The FBI put him in the witness-protection program, but he just couldn't stay away from the easy money and the adrenaline rush of crime. Some friends from work hooked him up with a branch of the Russian mafia. Ned enjoyed the work and the people, but when the stakes got too high, and he knew that some very important people wanted to see him dead, he escaped again, this time to Mexico.
A friend of a friend of a friend snuck him over the border and set him up with a job in Nogales. The city's official name was Heroica Nogales, in honor of the battles fought there, but everyone just called it Nogales. It is a big industrial city in the Mexican state of Sonora, and is almost never confused by people in the area with Nogales, the smaller agriculture-oriented city on the other side of the fence in Arizona. Ned had started to rebuild his life in Mexico. Working as an assistant manager at a screen-door factory wasn't going to make him rich, he realized, but it would keep him alive and out of prison long enough for him to make a plan.
He stopped where the cops indicated, and cranked down the window of the old Ford Tempo. “Buenos tardes . . . oh, hello, Gringo!” said the officer at his window. It was the guy with the goatee. Ned noticed he was wearing a lot of gold jewelry, again something the Federales discouraged if they hadn't banned it altogether. Two other cops pointed their guns at Ned, while another sat down on the sidewalk, playing a handheld video game. “You speak Spanish?”
“Pretty good,” Ned answered in Spanish, and he was telling the truth. It had been his favorite subject in high school. He had picked up a lot more from the workers at the company he worked for in Delaware and he had been immersed in the language since crossing the border. He wasn't quite fluent, but certainly conversant.
“Okay, so why are you driving a car with Sonora plates?”
“It's from the factory where I work.”
“Oh, you live here . . . on this side, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
The cop paused and smiled. “Why?” he asked.
Ned couldn't help but laugh. So did the man questioning him. “The weather,” he finally said.
“The weather
is the same on the Arizona side, my blue-eyed friend.”
The cop who had been playing the video game approached and interrupted. “Get him out of the car,” he ordered in Spanish. This guy, taller than the others, was clearly the group's leader, despite not having any special insignia on his uniform.
Ned got out and stood in the place they motioned him to, just in front of the car. The man who had summoned him told him in English to open his mouth and show him his teeth. Then he asked, “You British?” Ned told him he wasn't. “Canadian?” Again, Ned said he wasn't. The man was clearly frustrated.
“He's not worth anything,” he told the other men in Spanish and ordered them to search the car. He went back to his video game.
Since the Tempo was actually owned by the company and was used for various odd jobs and deliveries by all of the managers, there wasn't anything of value in it. On this trip, Ned was using it to pick up one of the owner's girlfriends—Lazara, an eighteen-year-old from Chiapas whose thick accent and reluctance to speak made drives with her very boring. But he certainly didn't mind ferrying around his boss's women, even Lazara, because it got him out of the factory. He hadn't seen much of Mexico, just the industrial area of Nogales where he lived and worked and a neighborhood called Colonia de Fundo Legal, where all the girlfriends lived. Neither made much of an impression on him. Most of the buildings were interchangeable—low and rectangular and either gray or beige with iron bars covering every opening. The roads were poorly paved when they were paved at all and there was litter everywhere. Dogs and small children ran all over the place, making driving a stressful nightmare. It was almost invariably sweltering and there were no trees, just small brushy bushes, dirt, rock, sand, and trash. It wasn't the Mexico Ned remembered from travel-agency ads. To him it looked more like some of the bad neighborhoods full of poured-concrete apartment blocks he had seen in Moscow, only constantly burning with heat.
The goateed cop asked him who he worked for. Ned told him, Holsamex. Radiff, an international manufacturing conglomerate based in Geneva, Switzerland, had diverse holdings around the world. One of them was Holsamex, a former warehouse in Nogales that had been converted to a factory when the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the United States was enacted in 1994. It had originally made aluminum wheels for SUVs, but when that business went to China, Holsamex switched to screen doors.
A series of bad, often passive, decisions throughout his life had gotten Ned into such big trouble he knew he had to escape. Without taking a moment to think about it, Ned could name a number of police forces (including the FBI), two outlaw motorcycle gangs, and the Neglinnaya branch of the Russian mafia who would like to have him in their hands. The cost to save his life had been huge—just about everything he had, including his beloved vintage Indian motorcycle.
Ned's papers now identified him as Alfredo Duncan—the locals pronounced it DOON-cahn—the descendant of immigrants from South Carolina who had sought a better life in a long-forgotten Confederate colony on Mexico's Gulf coast after the South lost the Civil War.
“So . . . what do you do there?” the cop interviewing him asked.
“Assistant manager.”
“Who's your boss?”
“Alvaro Fuentes Beltran.”
The cop with the goatee laughed. “El Orangután? He is my cousin's cousin,” he said. “Good guy, real good guy . . . don't cross him, though.”
Ned smiled and agreed not only that Alvaro was a great guy (he was lying, he thought Alvaro was a pig) but also that he knew it was wise to stay on his good side. He had never heard that nickname before, but it quickly made sense. Fuentes Beltran was short and stocky with a huge potbelly and long thin arms that gave him an ape-like gait. Chronic attempts to bleach his hair blonde had left it an iridescent orange. If his situation were not so dire, Ned probably would have laughed at the idea that his boss's friends called him “the Orangutan.”
When the inspection was done, the cop with the AK-47 who had been searching—clearly frustrated that he had found nothing worth stealing in the car—told Ned in Spanish that he needed “a little something” for “his time.” Ned had just less than a thousand pesos on him and needed to get gas, so he handed the cop about four hundred. The man sighed and motioned for him to get back in the car.
Just as Ned turned the key, he felt a tremendous shockwave as though the car had been lifted off the ground and thrown back down again. An intense pain shot up the back of his head, and he could hear nothing but a constant screech in his ears. Outside the car he saw people running. Instinctively, he got out of the car. When he stepped out, his legs couldn't carry his weight and he stumbled to the ground. Still unable to hear, Ned looked up. Two masked men—one dressed in an army uniform and the other in jeans and a plaid shirt—were running at him. As he groggily tried to get up, each man grabbed him by one elbow and dragged him away. He passed out.
* * *
Mike Meloni knew why he was in Captain Harrison's office. As the only veteran agent at the Philadelphia FBI office who wasn't working on Operation Commando—a nationwide raid aimed at weakening MS-13, a ruthless gang from El Salvador that had set up shop in Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia—he was going to get whatever was left over.
Harrison—one of those cookie-cutter midwestern guys with wire-framed glasses and cheap gray suits who made up the bulk of management—welcomed Meloni into his office. His reception was professionally courteous, but cold. A year earlier Meloni had discovered some local cops who were taking bribes in an investigation of crack sales in Wilkes-Barre and expanded the investigation to include them. It hadn't gained him many friends in the office, and there was a group of officers who considered him a rat—particularly one agent whose cousin was among those arrested. Besides, Meloni was from Boston's North End and had gone to MIT, a pair of facts that did not endear him to the local fraternity who took more traditional routes in their careers. Meloni didn't have many friends at the office, but—as he often reminded himself—that wasn't why he was there.
Meloni sat. Harrison sighed. “You remember Dave Kuzik?” he asked. “Must've heard he was killed in Marcus Hook?”
“Yeah,” Meloni acknowledged. “Wasn't he in semi-retirement?”
Harrison gave a polite half-laugh. “Yeah, he was watching rats,” he said, giving the word a nasty twist, “on our part of the Delmarva. And it looks like one of them had something of a problem with his management style.” It was clear Harrison was playing the part of the tough, dispassionate cop while at the same time underscoring a perceived affinity between himself and the victim's possible killers. Meloni knew that Kuzik had taught Harrison a lot when he was coming up, and that he must have been upset about the murder of his old mentor. Now, in a backhanded way, the captain was letting the rat redeem himself by ferreting out the man he believed had killed a brother officer.
“It's not usually a dangerous business. In fact, I've never heard of one of those guys going down before,” said Meloni, staying focused on the job at hand. “Do we have anything?”
“Yes and no,” Harrison replied, with a look that told Meloni he wasn't going to do his job for him. “You'll get a complete file and all the right numbers and e-mails, but I can tell you that it was an incredibly clean job.”
“Clean?” Meloni interrupted. “I heard his throat was slashed and there was blood everywhere, even a footprint.”
“His throat was slashed while he sat working at his laptop . . . not the tiniest bit of struggle. It's like he didn't even know the assailant was in the room until he was already bleeding out,” Harrison said angrily. “Nobody does that; makes me think this guy has military, almost certainly special forces, training.”
“What about the print?”
“Commonplace Nike sneaker, men's size 12; there are literally millions of them,” Harrison said with his eyebrows up. “But the impression was made some time after the time of death. Since it wasn't a robbery, it would seem as though the print we
re made by someone who arrived after the fact, saw the body, and fled.”
Meloni paused to think about that. “And the scene? The laptop wasn't stolen or tampered with, which makes me think that neither the assailant nor the post-murder interloper were rats . . . or they were just not very smart,” Meloni finished his sentence. “There's an auto-backup to the server,” he pointed out, realizing halfway through his thought that Harrison was not only aware of that but would be insulted th at he'd brought it up. But he continued, just as he had been taught during MIT brainstorming sessions. “Anything he had on the laptop would be in our hands already . . . although a rat probably would not know that.”
Harrison did indeed look annoyed. “Yep, and you have to go through all of it—and everything else related. I want this guy caught.”
Meloni thought that Harrison's dramatic tone was unnecessary, but didn't give in to the captain's desire for a fight. “Anything else I should know before I dive in?”
“Yeah, all the rats have been accounted for except one.”
“Who is he?”
“A biker from the Midwest named Ned Aiken,” Harrison answered. “No great shakes, caught in a roundup for traffickers, he gave up his ‘brothers’ in the Sons of Satan the second he could—he's a real ‘great guy.’”
“Killer?”
“Just the opposite,” Harrison said. “Seemed scared of the whole life; just a stupid kid who made a few bad friends and a lot of bad decisions. He could never pull off something like this.”
“What about his friends?”
“What friends?” Harrison snapped. “He's a rat.”
“What about rival bikers?” Meloni opined, again thinking out loud with no regard for protocol and Harrison's ego-driven give-and-take. “Some of the local guys could be impressed at how he brought down the Sons out west.”
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